loadlin and boot parameters
Hi,
I'm trying to get debian-installer to install sarge on a toshiba
portege 3020ct which I just bought. It's a bit awkward since it has
win98, but neither floppy nor bootable cdrom, so I've taken the
approach of FIPSing the win98 down, and using loadlin to boot the
hd-media version of d-i. I ran into the problem that has been reported
with this laptop that when looking for the network card, it locks up
trying to load yenta-socket (actually, as I was typing this mail, I
was also trying today's build of the 2.4 kernel d-i, and now it gets
an error and continues, rather than locking up, so I'm a lot better
off than I was a few mins ago, but I'm still interested in help with
loadlin+d-i, and there's still some 2.6 problem, so I'm sending it
along anyway). In the responses to an earlier message
about this problem, several people pointed out some boot parameters to
help, in particular hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false. Unfortunately, all
of the boot parameters to d-i seem to be ignored when I put them on
the loadlin line, although interestingly kernel parameters seem to be
understood (the ramdisk_size was needed to avoid an error, so that
must work). So, my first question is "am I doing something wrong in
getting the boot parameters from loadlin to d-i?" Here is the current
version of my boot.bat script (I know putting several flags is
probably not helpful, but I figured I would leave them in to show
things I'd tried... I've also tried BOOT_DEBUG=3:
loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/ram initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=35000 hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false expert emergency
When I activate the shell on console 2, I can see
hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false in the environment as reported by env,
but it seems to be ignored by hw-detect. This suggests that it's not a
problem with command.com needing something quoted.
I also tried the 2.6 images, and got an error uncompressing the
kernel (or maybe the ramdisk), both for the release candidate and the
daily build.
Unfortunately, since I have no bootable media, I'm pretty much stuck
with loadlin... the install manual seems to imply that GRUB could be
used in this situation-- is there a version of GRUB that runs under
windows? I could conceivably use the console-2-shell to run GRUB while
d-i is asking about language choices, but I figured it'd be better to
figure out how to get d-i to recognize "expert" or "emergency" if I'm
going with that approach... (but since the 1/7/05 build of 2.4 doesn't
freeze at least, I'm a bit better off...)
Of course, I'd also be interested in how to get the PCMCIA socket to
work eventually, since I'll certainly want to get my network card
working soon, so suggestions for that are welcome, too. If I figure
that out, I'd be happy to report it to hw-detect, of course.
Anyway, thanks for any help, and good work on d-i!
( the earlier message about the yenta lockup is
ae9652bf040919141722800f54@mail.gmail.com on 9/19/04 from Brandon
Coleman <metrix1978@gmail.com> )
thanks
- M
--
Mark "Monty" Montague | monty@gg.caltech.edu | I don't do Windows(tm)
If a tree falls when there's no one observing, does its wave function collapse?
<URL:http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~monty/monty.shtml>
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